The government’s new strategy for tackling human trafficking includes making it easier for foreign victims to get a residency permit, putting more money into investigations and providing better information for the hotel and holiday park industry about how to spot risky situations.

Publishing the cross-ministerial plans on Tuesday evening, junior justice ministry Mark Harbers said that ‘every day men, women and children become the victims of sexual, employment and criminal exploitation.’

It happens in private homes, hotels, holiday parks, on company premises, or farms and on ships, Harbers said. ‘We should not accept that this sort of thing is happening in the Netherlands,’ he said. ‘That is why the cabinet plans to intensify its efforts to tackle human trafficking.’

Earlier this week it emerged that prosecutions for human trafficking have almost halved in the last six years even though there is little sign that the practice has diminished.

Herman Bolhaar, the National Rapporteur for Human Trafficking and Sexual Violence against Children, said internal reorganisations within the police force and demands on resources meant victims of exploitation were being neglected, despite pledges to prioritise the issue.

‘There is not the slightest indication that the problem has got any smaller,’ Bolhaar told Nieuwsuur after the current affairs show obtained figures showing that just 141 cases went to court in 2017, compared to 315 in 2012.

The government hopes that by making it easier for victims to stay in the Netherlands, more will be willing to come forward. Currently victims are only given a residency permit if their evidence leads to a conviction or if the case takes more than three years.

One third of the registered victims comes from outside the EU and around one third has EU residency. One in six foreign victims is a minor, the justice ministry said on Wednesday.

‘We want to get people out of the hands of criminals and to arrest the criminals themselves,’ junior justice minister Mark Harbers said. ‘To do this we need to be able to offer them a safe place… and police complaints will have to be well-grounded enough to launch a prosecution.’

Harbers said it is important to recognise that human trafficking is not just about the sex industry. ‘We are talking about work-related exploitation or forced criminality. We are talking about people who are being forced to do things they would never opt to do in freedom.’